The global fascist reboot trap

The weekend brought reports that the man fired from Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign staff for posting a white supremacist image some time ago now works for Marco Rubio at the State Department. Another man, the former Chief Counsel for Nominations with the Senate Judiciary Committee, spent Sunday spewing racist rhetoric and insulting women’s physical features while saying people who disagreed with him needed to wear muzzles or burqas. He suggested that what he referred to as “bitching minorities” should leave the country.

This are just two of hundreds of examples of how reactionary attitudes and demands of right-wing trolls have been revealed as indistinguishable from those of Republican officials and staffers (many of whom have actually become online trolls, following the example of their president).

And the U.S. is no exception. Not only is there domestic comfort with racist and sexist statements in public that would have led to firings and social exclusion just a few years ago, but professional trolls around the globe often directly incorporate symbols or goals of fascist movements. Anyone who watches what’s happening in the world in the last decade has seen the parallel rise of right-wing candidates and movements, each of which has their own disturbing arc.

Many other countries are facing similarly harrowing developments, most recently Germany’s eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt delivering a plurality victory of the far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in the election held Sunday. Each of these movements is ostensibly about economic conditions, but their power draws primarily from the energy created by generating and sustaining anti-immigrant hatred.

I’ve written several times before about the concentration camp tendency, which precedes the arrival of mass roundups and mass extrajudicial detention in countries. That’s the process by which bad actors portray the economic survival or even the soul of the country as at risk, with the only solution being to exclude whole groups of people residing in the country from part or all of society.

Though their platforms get played as economic concerns, they often include quiet or public advocacy for women to stay at home, or for removing minorities from high positions. Yet at this moment in history, those issues are no longer effective enough in generating enough powerful political resentment on their own. Right now, the heart of the virulent global political backlash relies on anti-immigrant sentiment.

Today I want to talk about the arc of how fascist ideology winds up with popular support, how anti-immigrant disinformation gets created and spread, and what it means about how we can stand up, from an individual basis right up to the national level. These are not easy questions, but there are actual answers. Those answers are sometimes hard, too. And for the most part, they’re not the ones being adopted by leaders in the public sphere.

First, I want to address this dynamic of the role of anti-immigrant paranoia as the cornerstone of the growing support that right-wing parties are receiving. Which right-wing parties am I talking about? The ones that generally would reject comparisons to the Nazi Party but which nonetheless welcome Nazis as voters and use Nazi rhetoric, social goals, and even symbolism in their political campaigns and governance.

Spain’s El País had a nice summary of some key lessons to draw from the expanding support for AfD in Germany. One graphic shows that 91% of AfD voters agreed with the statement “I am very concerned that so many strangers live in Germany now.” Economic worries were just behind, followed by “The way of life in Germany is changing too much.”

It’s easy enough to assume without evidence that those things are naturally bound to one another. And right-wing politicians certainly do their level best to try to misrepresent reality and link economic difficulty with the presence of foreigners. But one thing I found while researching my history of concentration camps was that this linkage has to be created and stoked on an ongoing basis for voters to embrace it.

How does that happen? Through both deliberate propaganda and what we might call incidental propaganda.

Deliberate propaganda is put out by outlets controlled by or directly serving authoritarian parties or leaders, or those who aspire to authoritarianism. Facebook was used extensively in Myanmar to sow disinformation and paint the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, as sexually violent, unassimilable, and animal-like foreigners. This is a modern example of deliberate propaganda seeded by the government and aided by hate groups.

To ponder the key supporting role played by incidental propaganda, we can look at the post-Brexit study done in 2017 by King’s College London’s Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power. The study found that ahead of the Brexit vote, immigration coverage tripled, surging past economic issues in terms of attention received by news organizations. Four-fifths of the front page stories of immigration in that window were from outlets supporting Brexit. But among the rest, the simple shift of focus by nominally independent publications to the topic that the far-right wanted in the news at key moments like Brexit contributed to incidental propaganda.

Partisan disinformation

Closer to home, it was possible to see the same phenomenon in action when people like Christopher Rufo dragged anti-trans propaganda into American discourse by demanding and generating coverage of what he hoped to use to set the terms of the discussion—or his targeting of Claudine Gay’s research in order to remove her from her post as president of Harvard. These were presented as factual matters, but in truth, they were moral arguments and part of vicious attempts to cast Black women as undeserving of power and trans people as fundamentally unfit for human society.

A study out last month in the journal Social Science Quarterly from a trio of Syracuse University professors looked at links between partisan media exposure, acceptance of anti-immigrant misinformation, and moral judgments of immigrant deservingness of inclusion. The study—by Bixuan Ren, Nalae Hong, and Lars Willnat—examined exposure to traditional news, partisan cable news, and social media. The authors considered how each relates to the acceptance of misinformation, whether immigrants are deserving, and support or opposition to immigration policies.

What they found is that misinformation warps both the understanding of the facts around actual immigration policy and the moral mechanism for evaluating whether immigrants are worthy of inclusion in the country. You can correct the factual record, but if the misinformation dovetails with an underlying warped moral framework, that moral evaluation related to immigration will not change through simple correction of facts.

Interestingly, they also found partisan television still plays a key role in disseminating partisan information. That means that pushing back against propaganda in online spaces alone will not in and of itself be sufficient.

AfD victory

Of course, the U.S. is not Germany, which is not France, which is not England. So I’ll try to be narrow and specific about the argument I’m making here. In terms of regional specificity, for instance, some people have apparently suggested that eastern regions of Germany are to blame for the AfD’s rise, because support for the far-right is stronger in the East, with the implication that those who lived in East Germany during the Cold War have retrograde attitudes or a lingering appreciation of authoritarian rule.

But as historian Ned Richardson-Little wrote, the group that gave AfD the least support—31%—was the voters in Saxony-Anhalt who were over 70. And those are the voters who actually spent not only their childhood but half their lives living in a Stasi state.

As with many other countries, there are some strange dynamics going on in terms of demographics: the region in question lost half a million people since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The turnout was very high on a percentage basis of voters, as El País notes. But the population base that might have resisted the AfD and its propaganda of resentment may well be the ones with better economic options, the ones who left.

It’s also worth noting, because economist Paul Krugman wrote on Monday that unlike the U.S., Germany as a country is still highly industrialized, with the kind of economy that Trump has promised to build for the MAGA crowd. Yet (in part because of Trump’s tariffs, and in part for other reasons) the industrial base is Germany is eroding, with Volkswagen announcing 50,000 layoffs, coming on the heels of another 50,000 currently underway.

Turning back to the U.K., Brexiteers who got their dream—barriers to trade and immigration—sabotaged their own economy tragically over the last decade. The answers that MAGA pretends to be offering, the answers that many in the center and center-left in the U.S. and elsewhere are embracing in search of votes—to get rid of immigrants and to return to a golden era of industrialized production—are not just evil. They are not simple or effective answers at all.

Nostalgia for fascism

What we’re experiencing now is a global wave of nostalgia for a time when the public imagined that fascist tactics—the concentration camp tendency, mass removals, and even widespread detention in camps—might really solve their problems. But we’ve run this historical experiment before.

Many media outlets have been unwilling or unable to recognize the far-right shifts by conservative parties wanting to replay the first half of the prior century in the hopes of cementing power. Yet the paths those governments are taking—the profound persecution of targeted groups, the massive funding and building of detention facilities, the arrests of 50,000 people in the U.S. in July alone, with a prior monthly goal of three times as many—are more than familiar. Even those who are unable to acknowledge it know exactly where all this is leading. They’re just afraid to stand up to these tactics.

If the original twentieth-century cycle of fascism was built on nostalgia for an imaginary past, the twenty-first century version is based on nostalgia for a time when the fascist strategy of punishing minorities and women for every social problem could still be perceived as an innocent approach. The right understands exactly where it’s taking us. But establishment figures—center and center-left politicians among them—pretend that either the right is addressing popular resentments rather than creating them, or that they themselves have no idea where this all leads. But slightly moderated fascist tactics will not get us out of this.

A common history

In 2015, while I was working on the camps book, I went to a conference in Estonia. The title was a question: “Common European memory: Promise, or illusion, or challenge?” Every session was focused on how various EU states did or did not have a shared vision of the idea of Europe, its history, and its future. At the time, national perceptions seemed to be divided in many ways by the postwar experience. Western European countries had resisted then navigated the decline of empire and colonialism, while the Central and Eastern European nations had suffered under Soviet domination. These differences seemed almost insurmountable.

In the end, however, the same authoritarian tactics are being used to sow divisions across Europe—east, center and west. And those who would benefit from tyranny have discovered ever more effective and targeted propaganda in the digital age. As the Syracuse University researchers showed, television, too, has not lost its power.

Meanwhile, oligarchs on every continent are continually looking for ways to fund misinformation and unrest that would allow them to profit further. Even in Germany, where more than half a billion dollars in funding has come directly from the government—which funds political parties there—authorities have brought multiple cases against AfD members over massive illegal donations from billionaires. One judgment against the AfD involving illegally accepting millions of euros was handed down just four months ago.

As historian Thomas Zimmer explained in his post this week, it is a mistake to see these kinds of electoral victories as significant ideological shifts in the population—particularly when they are narrow (as in the U.S.) or fall short of a majority (in Germany, and the U.S. in 2016). That’s just not how voters think. These results do not indicate a massive retrenchment of ideology nationwide. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous.

What we can do

I would argue that those who support democracy in the U.S. are going to have to come up with not only a strategy for November elections, but a larger framework for a long-term approach. For those who truly wish for a democratic country, there can be no permanent seizure of power, because there will always be incumbent backlash.

This means that the system itself has to be reformed. The postwar ideals of asylum for refugees on the international level, and humanity toward immigrants on the national one, were both flawed constructs that often violated their promises. But they offered some commitment to an agreed-upon past and future. Every party and party leader wishing to preserve the possibility of a democratic future in Germany and the U.S. (and elsewhere) will have their own answers and their own language for what needs to happen. But at root, it will require addressing the ongoing corruption of the state via the abuse of scapegoated communities, especially immigrants.

So work locally to establish a coherent and explicit moral framework for the policies you’re pushing. Present a narrative about it. There will be times to bring that narrative to the forefront, and times to focus on specific policies instead. But you have to understand the bigger picture of what’s happening with propaganda and disinformation if you want not only to win elections but to stop ascendant fascism. Work to connect the local frame with a national movement.

To extrapolate the Syracuse University researchers’ findings beyond what they looked at, I would say that you have to offer different immigration policies attached specifically to a different moral framework. You can adjust policies here and there, which might bring limited relief to some communities. But if you don’t create a bigger narrative that reframes the moral assumptions that are so vulnerable to misinformation, you’re not vaccinating your country against the biggest, worst part of what is happening. A band-aid is not going to cure Germany of the threat from the AfD. And it will not save the United States from Trumpism.

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